I hate the M50 [Warning post #222]

RustyNut

bucketybuck wrote: »

If you truly believe that it is necessary to completely suit down the busiest road in the country for 6 hours to gather exhaustive evidence in order to prosecute somebody who admits to "simply losing control" then bully to you.

The people who know more than you or me have obviously decided that is what was needed.
If that was you looking at a possible charge of dangerous driving which carries a hefty jail term would you not want your defence barrister to have all the relevant information.

Larbre34

RustyNut wrote: »

How else can evidence to support a prosecution of the guilty parties (if any) be gathered if the road is not closed and a forensic examination carried out.

Sure what does forensic mean in this case? A complete photo series can be shot in daylight +30 mins, and the road washing commence while the vehicles are being removed. That road should be been open by 8am at the VERY latest, it would have been in any other Country and there is no argument to the contrary.

This is about planning, resources and readiness. The spoofer from TII comes on the radio at lunchtime winning himself a full house in the game of bulls*** bingo, spouting excuses about the perfect storm and busy Wednesdays and communications, but the fact is there have been other almost as serious closures, as recent as Friday 3 weeks ago, yet nothing is learned, no debriefs obviously take place, no review of procedures seems to happen.

The M50 concessioner takes in over €400,000 in tolls EVERY SINGLE DAY and yet there seems to be no compulsion on them to have hit squads and mobile resources ready at every jump off point to deal with this kind of thing. Its not new, its not innovative, you could go to the French or German motorway network today and see how you deal properly with an accident like this.

KwackerJack

There are 2 culprits here.......The people who designed the road and the people who drive on it!

The people who designed it were clearly not thinking and the people who drive on it don't think either......Standard of driving in Ireland is awful!

The tail back today was most likely caused by someone not paying attention whilst taking a chance and the usual rubber kneckers!

Pinch Flat

Anyway in other moos

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/extreme-care-needed-as-cow-breaks-looses-on-m50-705178.html

magicbastarder

bucketybuck wrote: »

With all due respect, I would fully support you being prosecuted for causing a crash on the M50 and impacting thousands of other people.

Simply lost control? Not good enough.

let's say i'm on one of those very tight bend on-ramps coming onto the m50, such as the one at the red cow, and i hit oil a previous vehicle has spilled on the road and lose control. how do i prove my innocence (or that my story is true) without taking samples of the road surface?
actually, that was a bad way to phrase that; it's not up to me to prove my innocence, it's up to the prosecution to prove my guilt.

magicbastarder

Pinch Flat wrote: »

Anyway in other moos

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/extreme-care-needed-as-cow-breaks-looses-on-m50-705178.html

bloody lazy journalism. they had to mention it was on the M50 though it's clearly on the M11.

HeidiHeidi

magicbastarder wrote: »

bloody lazy journalism. they had to mention it was on the M50 though it's clearly on the M11.

It's at the M50/M11 merge according to twitter

bucketybuck

magicbastarder wrote: »

let's say i'm on one of those very tight bend on-ramps coming onto the m50, such as the one at the red cow, and i hit oil a previous vehicle has spilled on the road and lose control. how do i prove my innocence (or that my story is true) without taking samples of the road surface?
actually, that was a bad way to phrase that; it's not up to me to prove my innocence, it's up to the prosecution to prove my guilt.

You could chip in with the thousands of other drivers who also crashed at that spot on that day because of driving that exact same route?

Oh, wait, it was just you wasn't it?

magicbastarder

HeidiHeidi wrote: »

It's at the M50/M11 merge according to twitter

the article states "specifically between J17 M11 and J5 Bray North on the M11."

HiGlo

magicbastarder wrote: »

let's say i'm on one of those very tight bend on-ramps coming onto the m50, such as the one at the red cow, and i hit oil a previous vehicle has spilled on the road and lose control. how do i prove my innocence (or that my story is true) without taking samples of the road surface?
actually, that was a bad way to phrase that; it's not up to me to prove my innocence, it's up to the prosecution to prove my guilt.

This happened me....
I was coming off the M50 at N7 and decelerating from 60 to 50. There was oil on the road from a previous incident. It was pissing rain and my car out of nowhere went sliding across the road. I did a full 360 spin and hit the kerb and slid back over the other side of the road. I wasn't going too fast, I just slid in oil.
I actually hadn't realised there was oil at all. Only when I got out of the car I could see there was green gravel on the ground (so had been laid by council to absorb oil) and the paramedic told the hospital when I was brought in that it was an RTA due to oil on the road. He showed them the sole of my boots as I'd walked in the gravel.

magicbastarder

bucketybuck wrote: »

You could chip in with the thousands of other drivers who also crashed at that spot on that day because of driving that exact same route?

Oh, wait, it was just you wasn't it?

if thousands of other drivers are still able to use the ramp after i've slid off it, why are you getting on your high horse about the road being shut down?

bucketybuck

RustyNut wrote: »

The people who know more than you or me have obviously decided that is what was needed.
If that was you looking at a possible charge of dangerous driving which carries a hefty jail term would you not want your defence barrister to have all the relevant information.

Frankly, I wouldn't expect the busiest road in the country to be shut down for 6 hours just to help me with a court case, but thats just me.

Do you honestly think it took 6 hours to take every concievable picture of the scene and measure every inch of tyre rubber left on the ground? I wonder how many of those 6 hours were spent waiting for somebody else to reach the scene? Tens of thousands of people affected remember.

I actually have a lot of respect for the responders to these crashes, they often have the vehicles involved out of the way within minutes and deserve great credit. But shutting the entire thing for 6 hours also deserves questioning.

bucketybuck

magicbastarder wrote: »

if thousands of other drivers are still able to use the ramp after i've slid off it, why are you getting on your high horse about the road being shut down?

Read for comprehension please.

RustyNut

bucketybuck wrote: »

Frankly, I wouldn't expect the busiest road in the country to be shut down for 6 hours just to help me with a court case, but thats just me.

If a family member of yours was killed and the guilty party was to get off because the investigation was cut short to facilitate traffic flow would that be ok with you.

Or if you killed someone and were facing 10 years what part of the investigation that might clear you would you like to see skimped on?

LXFlyer

RustyNut wrote: »

The people who know more than you or me have obviously decided that is what was needed.
If that was you looking at a possible charge of dangerous driving which carries a hefty jail term would you not want your defence barrister to have all the relevant information.

I don't think anyone would question the need to gather all of the evidence necessary in these circumstances. Quite the opposite.

However, I do think that people, or probably more specifically, their elected representatives via perhaps an oireachtas committee, are entitled to question the protocols involved.

The chaos that resulted across the city from this closure was massive, and I'd like to think that, for example, the garda are not above being asked about the protocols, and the length of time that it takes to complete the process in order that people at least understand why the M50 needed to be closed for over 6 hours.

Clearly there would be a time lag between the incident taking place and the necessary forensic teams arriving, but I'd be interested to understand exactly what was involved in the work that was carried out.

magicbastarder

the main issue with what you're proposing is a reversal of the 'innocent until proven guilty' basis of the legal system here. you cannot find someone legally responsible simply because they were involved in a crash because there can be mitigating circumstances. if there is no attempt to find those mitigating circumstances, you blow away any chance of prosecuting.

roverrules

Pinch Flat wrote: »

Anyway in other moos

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/extreme-care-needed-as-cow-breaks-looses-on-m50-705178.html

They should have herded it to the Red Cow interchange

oppenheimer1

Qualitymark wrote: »

This is why I'm suggesting that a map with times and dates (and of course this would include day of the week) and places when traffic jams occur on the M50 and other motorways would be useful. If it became clear (to pick an example out of the air) that the Mad Cow entrance or exit was blocked for 15 minutes every weekday at 4.45pm, it would obviously be good information for drivers, who could time their journeys to avoid that time.

Google traffic does this. You can select days and times and it will predict traffic based on historic data

OldMrBrennan83

This post has been deleted.

mhackett102

thierry14 wrote: »

Really getting sick of these idiots crashing on The M50

How ****ing thick do you have to be to crash there.

How the **** can they not drive in a straight line without crashing.

Crashing into a truck, what the ****.

VisibleGorilla wrote: »

Anyone who has a crash on the M50 should be banned from driving for one year, simple.

If you have a crash on a straight road motorway you are a danger to yourself and others.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/show-some-decency-irish-woman-blasts-commuters-complaining-about-carmaggedon-34191197.html

As soon as I came across this article I thought of the two of these posts that I seen this morning. Im pretty sure that if that was a close relative of yours, or even you yourself, then your opinion would change farely fast.

Muahahaha

listermint wrote: »

Driving a motorbike recently and if I was a guard I would be issuing a ticket literally every 5 cars or so.

Smart Phones are the number one cause of shunts they single handedly are possibly costing the working economy millions a year via traffic delays .

We didn't have as many accidents in the boom when people just had Nokia phones that could only SMS . distractions distraction's Facebook what's app viber . having to look at the screen to type on the keyboard .


Opens your eyes when viewed from a bike

As a motorcyclist on the m50 from time to time I can only agree with this. When it slows down to 40-50kph it is astonishing how many white glows I can see from car drivers using their phones. My guess is a lot of the small shunts on the m50 are caused by this cohort texting and not being able to brake in time.

shaunn

Once you have Google Maps opened on your mobile device, packets of data is sent from your device to Google and back again. In doing this, it helps create a traffic picture. "If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody." —The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data, August 25, 2009. Official Google Blog.

oppenheimer1

Patww79 wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Select typical traffic at the bottom rather than live traffic.

OldMrBrennan83

This post has been deleted.

BohsCeltic

Left Blanch at 7.30 am and got just past liffey valley at 10.30.
At least i made it though.
Hope the girl is alright.

People flying up the hard shoulder and everything.

Chris_5339762

An hour and ten minutes to travel 8.5km from Clontarf to Rialto this morning. That was fun.

Diane Selwyn

wasn't on the m50 this morning thankfully but certainly noticed the increased volume of traffic on other roads. It's mad that one accident should have such a noticeable and prolonged effect on the whole city - still we are a way off 'carmageddon' http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/10/chinas-50-lane-traffic-jam-is-every-commuters-worst-nightmare/409639/

Grandeeod

lxflyer wrote: »

I don't think anyone would question the need to gather all of the evidence necessary in these circumstances. Quite the opposite.

However, I do think that people, or probably more specifically, their elected representatives via perhaps an oireachtas committee, are entitled to question the protocols involved.

The chaos that resulted across the city from this closure was massive, and I'd like to think that, for example, the garda are not above being asked about the protocols, and the length of time that it takes to complete the process in order that people at least understand why the M50 needed to be closed for over 6 hours.

Clearly there would be a time lag between the incident taking place and the necessary forensic teams arriving, but I'd be interested to understand exactly what was involved in the work that was carried out.

In a car dependent city like Dublin and with no viable PT alternative to the M50 and how it has shaped the city, this is what we should expect. It has happened before. But its never an election issue..ever. You reap what you sow.

Personally I'm very saddened by some of the contributions here today. It's currently an injured person but could be a dead person. All the emphasis is on getting the motorway opened asap with little regard to life. There is very little emphasis on why we are trapped in our car dependency. There was talk about other European countries and how they would deal with this, but no talk of how the public transport infrastructure is generally better in these countries and the adverse affect of a road closure is lessened.

Take London as an example. A vast area. Even when their M25 is messed up, other parts of the London area function as normal. I've witnessed it. Now that's one big place. But Dublin gets choked to hell if the M50 stops. Why? PT is crap and with the effective cancellation of MN and DU we are heading for decades of misery.

But its not an election issuse, just a moanfest from a people that seem to not give a damn about human life and expect the road to be always open in front of them.

OldMrBrennan83

This post has been deleted.

JMSE

I'm surprised this happened as early as 5.30am but things are getting busier and people are getting on the road earlier.

The merge area where this happened should be flagged as a 'black spot' although they dont do this anymore and never on motorways. I can't say what happened either, just what has happened to me right there on countless occasions.

2 lanes merge onto the M50 here, the inside one is a 'pressure free' merge as it is about 5km long (accession lane they call it I think). However the outer one is about 75 mtrs long and merges with Lane 1 of the M50 in an extremely short distance.

So you have 'slower' moving traffic in the outer merge who are most likely accelerating and trying to get up to the speed of the traffic in Lane 1 before they slip in between vehicles in Lane 1. All it takes is for one car to not be up to an ideal speed and suddenly you have people pausing and braking and combine that with an extremely short merge zone as marked on the road, and you are in trouble.

Most of the HGVs going southbound here will be in Lane 1 and they will ALL be trying to hold their speed as this is an uphill stretch for them too. Personally speaking, I try not to be in Lane 1 here, too dangerous. The rules of the road would have everybody adjust their speed to allow others to merge, and that may have happened here, but the merge is too short. Its almost like a T junction onto the M50 for anyone not up to speed.

Worse again for Lane 1 drivers who are doing 100 coming up to this merge is this scenario.... A driver comes off the N4 to go southbound and he/she is in the inner merge lane, but are getting held up by whatever in front of them. They realise theres nobody in the outer merge lane so they drive over the chevron and hey presto, they've about 50 metres to go until they hit Lane 1 and they are not up to speed. Also adding to the impending danger is the fact that the HGVs and others already using Lane 1 werent expecting this sudden introduction into their immediate future and wont have time to adjust their speed so what happens?? Luck takes over thats what happens, but today might have been a day when luck ran out, somebody jammed on, and a car got sandwiched.

So who to blame, who knows, but theres bad engineering at play.